The right thing

Jane Cadzow

To celebrate Good Weekend's 30th anniversary, we have selected 30 of the magazine's best features of the past three decades. This article was originally published on August 14, 2004. For the full list, click here.

For more than an hour, Ross Cameron has been toying dejectedly with the blueberry bagel on the desk in front of him. Finally, he picks it up and tosses it into the bin. "This discussion has completely destroyed my appetite," he says.

A former corporate lawyer and one-time aide to a US Republican senator, Ross Cameron is deeply religious and radically right-wing - a proponent of small government, unfettered private enterprise, lower taxes and fewer welfare programs. Photo: Scanned from original Good Weekend story

At 39, Cameron is one of the youngest, most outspoken members of Federal Parliament - and the closest thing to an American-style neo-conservative in Australian politics. A former corporate lawyer and one-time aide to a US Republican senator, he is deeply religious and radically right-wing - a proponent of small government, unfettered private enterprise, lower taxes and fewer welfare programs. On paper, some of his views sound a little scary even to his Liberal Party colleagues, but face-to-face he can be so eloquent and engaging that it's easy to catch yourself nodding and thinking, "Gee, maybe public housing is a bad idea."

It's this mix of extreme ideology and personal persuasiveness - along with the fact that he is defending one of the most marginal seats in the country - that makes Cameron a compelling figure for Canberra-watchers.

"If my constituents want to vote for a great family man, they should probably vote for the other guy." Photo: AFR

As parliamentary secretary to Treasurer Peter Costello, he is a relatively junior member of the Coalition Government, but sheer force of personality has made him influential. "Ross has a lot more real impact on public life than his position as a parliamentary secretary would suggest," says Health Minister Tony Abbott. "When he opens his mouth in the party room, people always listen. What he says is almost never routine or humdrum." According to Liberal backbencher Bruce Baird, Cameron "is the only person who, when he speaks in the party room, is likely to get great applause at the end".

Prime Minister John Howard is an unabashed fan. As Abbott puts it, "The PM likes and respects Ross." When he recently visited Cameron's western Sydney electorate of Parramatta, Howard described him to a journalist as "absolutely fantastic ... He can certainly, to use that old expression, charm the birds off the trees with his silver tongue."

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Today, though, there are long silences in the inner sanctum of Cameron's electoral office. We are talking about his family - he is married with four young children - and his mood is pensive, almost confessional. "I think I have been selfish," he says. "There are lots of ways that I think I should have been a better father and a better husband."

His rimless glasses give him a scholarly air but Cameron is tall, broad-shouldered and athletic. On the campaign trail, brandishing a pink-cheeked son or daughter in each arm, he looks as though he has stepped out of Christian Parenting magazine. His kids are often part of his entourage as he barnstorms through Parramatta.

Photographs of them appear in the promotional leaflets and newsletters he distributes to the electorate's 90,000 residents. An advocate of a higher Australian birth rate, he is perceived as a poster boy for procreation and upright living. "Mr Family Values," says David Borger, the Parramatta city councillor who contested the seat for Labor at the last federal election.

But now, away from the bunting and the hoopla - and the three huge billboards bearing his likeness that went up last month - Cameron is anything but self-congratulatory. "If you asked me, 'Could I have been a better father and husband?', the answer is overwhelmingly, 'Yes,'" he says. "If my constituents want to vote for a great family man, they should probably vote for the other guy."

His Labor opponent in the coming election is in fact a woman - Julie Owens, chief executive of the Association of Independent Record Labels, who needs a swing of just 1.2 per cent to unseat him. Cameron won Parramatta in 1996, aged 31, and has successfully defended it twice - in 1998 and 2001. In Canberra, where the books on his office shelves include The Case for Christ and Margaret Thatcher: The Downing Street Years, he is the founder of a cross-party group that gathers on Monday evenings for prayer and contemplation. Raised as a Presbyterian, "Ross wears his faith on his sleeve," says Tourism Minister Joe Hockey, who shares a house with him in the national capital.

Cameron may be devout but he isn't mealy-mouthed. A few months ago, when his sustained criticism of the contemporary art collection at Parliament House ended in a change to the acquisitions policy, he claimed it as a victory over the "correct, highbrow, holier-than-thou, 'you-must-like-this-shit' brigade". A freewheeling iconoclast, he has called into question government subsidies for rural industries, arguing that farmers who complain they're going broke in the bush should move to the city and get a job. He caused outrage when he took a swipe at the Anzac tradition of mateship and egalitarianism, maintaining that "it militates against excellence. It destroys innovation. And the sooner we walk away from all that, the better."

Federal Parliament sits for 22 weeks a year. When Cameron isn't in Canberra, he's out in his electorate, gladhanding in shopping centres and spruiking at sausage sizzles. Perhaps he is concerned that his family has suffered as a result of his being away from home so much. Is that why he feels he has let them down? "No," he replies. "Fundamentally it's because of selfishness ... The question is, do you put your own wishes, interests, desires, ahead of those of the other people in your life?"

As always, he talks slowly and deliberately, but his leg jiggles under the desk and his face is set in a tense mask. "All I'm saying is, I don't want to hold myself out to you or anybody else as a guy who's really got his crap together."

I leave feeling intrigued. Cameron is famous for his composure and self-assurance. What's behind the crisis of confidence?

To begin to understand Cameron, you have to know about his father. Jim Cameron was a morals crusader and long-serving member of the NSW Parliament who quit the Liberal Party in 1983 because he thought it was too left-wing. He joined Fred Nile's Call to Australia team, switching to a seat in the State's upper house, but was forced to retire in 1984 after he had a heart attack while addressing an anti-abortion meeting.

A few years earlier, he had been the only person in the NSW Legislative Assembly to oppose the establishment of an organ transplant program, declaring that his religious beliefs made it impossible for him to treat the human body as a collection of spare parts. But facing death at the age of 55, he became the first parliamentarian - and oldest Australian - to have a heart transplant.

New ticker in place, he was desperate to get back into politics, but repeated attempts to win Liberal preselection failed. Finally, he offered to stand for any party that wanted him. None did. Seen as self-important and sanctimonious, Cameron snr was not a popular man. At his funeral in Sydney in 2002, even his friend John Howard conceded that he could be "provoking, at times infuriating". But Ross Cameron, the second of his six children, loved him fiercely - "I thought he was fabulous" - and spent his youth trying to win his approval. His father, he admits, was hard to please: "He was very demanding."

For years, Ross and his older brother Jock played competition tennis. "Dad would come to every match," Ross says. "He would sit on the sidelines and fret. Chew his bottom lip." While he never actually erupted in a tantrum, "he would get incredibly agitated if he felt the umpire was being biased against his kids. I'd be saying, 'Dad, just relax. It's not a big deal.'"

It seems to Jock, now a National Prayer Breakfast organiser, that their father's fixation on sporting success stemmed from his chafing at his own physical limitations after rheumatic fever at 13 left him with a weak heart. "I think there was a Wimbledon champion who lived within his breast," he says, "and to some degree he wanted to live that out in us."

Jock refused to co-operate. "I used to take great satisfaction in not playing well and feeling him fill with frustration on the sidelines ... I took the path of rebelling against my dad through practised mediocrity." Ross was the one who threw himself into the rallies. Whatever his father asked of him, he rose to the task. As Jock remembers, "I'd always say 'no' and Ross would always say 'yes'."

Jim Cameron's kids weren't allowed to wear jeans or watch television. (One afternoon, he came home from work and found all six of his offspring staring at the screen. When he greeted them, no one responded. "So he switched off the TV, unplugged it, put it in a cupboard and left it there for 10 years," Ross says.) But life at the Camerons' was never dull. Sister Christina fondly remembers their father as an exuberant character who believed in wringing the most out of every day.

Mealtimes were an opportunity for general knowledge quizzes. "Dad would ask a question and it would go around the table," she says. "You would say 'pass' if you didn't know the answer." After dinner, each of the siblings - and their guests, if any - could be required to stand and address the gathering. Jim Cameron picked the topic and interjected with comments like, "Stop fidgeting! Speak up!"

Ross recalls that his school friends grew wary of visiting. "I'd say, 'Do you want to come over and play?' They'd say, 'Do I have to give a speech?'"

When Ross and Jock started going out with girls, their father made clear which of their dates he liked and which he didn't. "He would take an active interest in our love lives," says Ross, smiling grimly. "We'd be saying, 'Dad, why don't you let us manage these relationships?'"

Their father and their mother had married after a one-way courtship ("He proposed to her many times and she rejected him very consistently over a long period until he basically just wore her down") and in many ways they were a study in contrasts - she as calm and polite as he was abrasive. Jim Cameron's behaviour in public sometimes embarrassed his wife and children. "If he was irritated by lack of service or something like that, he'd kind of throw his weight around," says Ross. "...I remember once speaking to a waiter in a restaurant in an impatient way and my mother giving me a major dressing-down about it."

Just as Cameron snr rued missing the chance to shine on centre court, he saw himself as a thwarted statesman. In the NSW Parliament, he had risen to be Speaker and deputy Liberal leader. Many would have been satisfied, but for him it was not enough. "He finished his career with a sense of failure that he had never been Premier," says Ross, who had been anointed at an early age to follow him into politics. "He would say to me, 'Do you want to be Prime Minister?' And he would want me to be able to salute, click the heels and say, 'Yes, I'm on the job.'"

Eventually, the dutiful son protested.

When Ross was 17, he and his father had a blazing row - "a massive confrontation, which was a rejection of lots of aspects of him and his approach to life ... I guess all his shortcomings as a parent became obvious to me." But the breach was only temporary. "The relationship gradually repaired over a year or so. After that, it was a much more balanced relationship."

In 1996, Ross sat next to Joe Hockey on the plane to Canberra after both had won places in Parliament. They had been acquaintances since competing against one another in inter-school debating tournaments. Hockey says Cameron was an unusual teenager - "earnest, focused and very parliamentary in his demeanour. Grew up young. He was a man before his time." The pressure of parental expectation had taken a toll, Hockey believes. "His father was both an inspirational and domineering figure in his life. He was very tough on Ross."

At any rate, all that practice at public speaking paid off. Cameron's maiden speech in the House of Representatives was delivered without notes in a bravura performance recalled vividly by those who were present. It wasn't only the oratory, but the message that got attention. He used the occasion to spell out his philosophical objection to government interference in the lives of individuals, stopping just short of calling for the abolition of the state.

A couple of weeks after our meeting in his Parramatta office, I phone Cameron to ask him about rumours I have been hearing. He sounds almost relieved to have them brought into the open. "I don't want to live under... This is the worst part of my job, by a mile," he says. "I can take any of the flack that the Labor Party dishes up to me, easily.

I can deal with the periodic blues I have with Costello and the PM." What he can't take is the weight of his conscience - "this sense of living with your own hypocrisy or inconsistency".

A few days later, after consulting with his wife, Genevieve, he tells me he wants to put the record straight. "I have been an unfaithful husband," he says. "My wife has had some pretty good reasons to walk away, and it's frankly pretty amazing that she hasn't already. But she is very focused on the welfare of the kids and I think that's helped her stay strong and positive in a tough situation."

From any politician, it would be an extraordinary admission. From a Christian conservative who is fighting to hold a marginal seat, the frankness is all the more remarkable. But Cameron says the gap between his image and the reality is the very reason he feels the need to speak out. "I think people are entitled to have a more unvarnished view of who I am if I'm asking them to vote for me," he says. "Then they can form their own judgements."

Both Tony Abbott and Labor leader Mark Latham have recently had aspects of their past personal lives dredged up and examined in the media. On the whole, though, parliamentarians and other public figures are afforded a measure of privacy in this country, and Cameron believes Australia is a better place for it. "I don't want to encourage a kind of voyeuristic picking-over the bones of every man's or woman's foibles and imperfections," he says. "But I feel that in my case, I ought to explicitly disabuse people of a perception that I am as good as my family photo looks. The problem is that if you are conservative and your kids are photogenic, you wind up almost by default looking like the very emblem of everything good and wholesome. I don't want people to feel like I'm using Christianity or my kids to get re-elected."

He knows his family is part of his appeal to some of his constituents. "I think there is a deeply held hope among a lot of Australians that the ideal of the happy family can be fulfilled in reality," he says. "There is a desire for that to be true. And I think that's a good thing. I want it to be true, too." He knows some will be dismayed by his disclosure of infidelity: "I worry about disillusioning people." But he has decided it is best to be honest about his situation and to take his chances at the ballot box. "This is real life."

I am reminded of an earlier conversation with Joe Hockey. "Ross is not a perfect character," he said. "He has character flaws and he has crosses to carry, as everyone does in one form or other. But he knows the meaning of contrition and he knows the meaning of penance. And I think he is a richer person for all the difficulties he has gone through."

Hockey adds that Cameron is less inclined than he once was to proselytise: "He has passed through the preacher phase." Byron Koster, a partner at Cameron's old law firm, Blake Dawson Waldron, detects in his friend a softening on social issues. "I've seen a lessening in his conservatism since his father died," says Koster. Cameron seems "less judgemental. Less rigid. Less idealistic, I suppose you could say."

He is still a fundamentalist free marketeer, though, convinced of the virtues of competition and self-help. "My starting assumption is that individuals ought to be left with the freedom and the responsibility to solve their own problems in their own way," he says. "I have a much deeper scepticism about the ability of the state to improve people's quality of life than most, and possibly all, of my colleagues."

Cameron was briefly in the news mid-last year when named as a recipient of campaign donations from Karim Kisrwani, the businessman at the centre of the so-called cash-for-visas affair. Emerging unscathed, he was promoted in October to the position of parliamentary secretary to the Treasurer, with portfolio responsibility for financial markets, corporate governance, foreign investment and consumer affairs. Essentially, it is his job to regulate Australian business, yet as he reportedly acknowledged when he introduced himself to bemused executives of the Competition and Consumer Commission, he is "a laissez-faire kind of man". When a journalist asked him what Howard and Costello had been thinking when they appointed him, he said: "I don't know what they had in mind. Some people regard it as a momentary lapse of reason."

Cameron can be lyrical on the subject of human endeavour. "I want people to shoot for the stars, take risks, believe the best about themselves," he says. "I think the greatest wasted resource in Australia is not water but talent." Local councillor David Borger isn't sure how much the rhetoric helps the 10,000 families living in public housing in the poorest parts of Cameron's electorate. "He's like the American motivational speakers who say, 'If you just try hard enough, you're going to get there,'" Borger says. "To me, it seems like a pipedream that's being sold to people who are so disadvantaged that, really, governments need to be looking at trying to do something, rather than just saying something, to alleviate their condition."

Borger finds Cameron highly personable. Even when they stood against one another in the 2001 federal election, the two men would meet occasionally for a beer and chat ("I shouldn't be telling the world this," says the councillor. "I'll get into trouble."). But there's something about Cameron that worries Borger. "There were occasions when I'd see him giving out his business card with a lolly stuck to it to young children in a housing commission area. I just thought, 'That's pretty crass. That's pretty un-Australian.'"

Cameron lives in one of the electorate's priciest enclaves in a house he bought for $950,000 eight years ago, when he gave up corporate law to start his parliamentary career. "Ross is a former builder's labourer..." says the biography on his website, but it's not as if he clawed his way up from humble beginnings. Educated at Knox Grammar, on Sydney's North Shore, he then studied law and economics at Sydney University, sharing a house for a couple of years with media heir Warwick Fairfax. He worked on building sites full-time for only two months while saving to go overseas.

By the time he was 25, he had visited the United States five times and worked for US senator Mark Hatfield. (Knowing his interest in US politics, I ask if he watches The West Wing on television. "Smarmy complacency of the Left," he says, adding: "Maybe that's a bit unkind.")

His American sojourns appear to have influenced Cameron's campaign style. Street stalls, sample bags, balloons, volunteers wearing Ross Cameron T-shirts - "pure Hollywood," says Bruce Baird, who as NSW transport minister employed him as a policy adviser in the 1980s. Baird remembers arriving in the office one morning to hear Cameron saying to the assistant press secretary, "'So, Debbie, what do you really feel about life? What is it that's important to you?' And she said, 'For heaven's sake, Ross, get off my bloody desk. I'm just focusing on getting into work.'"

Cameron has always been preoccupied by the big questions. "Sometimes you could strangle him," says Canberra housemate Joe Hockey, who knows no one less bothered by domestic details or more capable of mislaying sets of keys. "It seems like every second night that I'll get a tap on the window or my mobile phone will go off: Ross has locked himself outside."

On the other hand, Cameron understands the difference a mown lawn can make to morale. In his electorate, he organises teams of volunteers to tidy the yards of frail and elderly people who are battling to stay in their own houses rather than be forced into nursing homes. A great believer in private philanthropy as an alternative to government assistance, he leads a group of parliamentarians in an annual long-distance bike ride that has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities. In 2000, he joined the Aboriginal reconciliation march over the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Cameron has friends across the political spectrum. Even those offended by everything he represents tend to warm to him personally - "because he's a very friendly, sociable bloke," says Laurie Ferguson, Labor member for the adjoining seat of Reid. "He's one of those people you like having a drink with." Says Labor Senator Stephen Conroy: "You can be as outrageous as you want on policy if you've got a bit of charm. And Ross has charm." Democrat Senator Andrew Murray describes Cameron as quirky and interesting, while Joe Hockey suspects he has "a pastoral streak in his DNA. If a colleague - Liberal, Labor, Independent, anyone - is going through some personal torment, he goes around to their office and asks them how they're doing. He can keep confidences."

Politics is full of secrets and lies. "We live in a world where everything's got to be fabulous all the time," Cameron says. "Where whenever anyone asks if you're confident of winning your seat, the textbook answer is, 'Yes, of course I'm going to win. We've got 'em on the ropes!' At all times, you have to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. As individuals, people may be going through all kinds of crises, but you would never know."

Of course, it's not only in parliament that unhappiness hides behind closed doors. "Every second or third house you drive past in your street, there's a marriage inside which is struggling for oxygen," says Cameron, who knows that by speaking out about his own problems he is putting his career on the line. His father wanted him to be Prime Minister. Cameron is young, bright and ambitious. Even if too unorthodox to be leadership material, he could have a big future on the national stage. But for him, the possibility of separation or divorce has put everything else into perspective. "If I could get to the end of my life with my marriage intact," he says, "I would regard that as a greater achievement than anything I may or may not do politically."

I ask if he feels any better for having laid bare his life. "A little," he says after a long pause.

"I suppose it's one step towards the light."

To celebrate Good Weekend's 30th anniversary, we have selected 30 of the magazine's best features of the past three decades. This article was originally published on August 14, 2004. For the full list, click here.